Today the 35th Annual Archaeological Conference was held in Jerusalem, and fortunately for us, Aren Maeir was there and has commented on some of the interesting presentations that were given.
You can read his blog for the full report, but here are the three of most interest to this blog author:
1) Haggai Misgav spoke about the Kh. Qeiyafa inscription, which still is for the most part undeciphered, but he showed some good slides of the 5 lines, 50 letters, and showed nicely the reading of, e.g., eved (slave), melek (king), al t’as (don’t do in biblical hebrew), etc. Inter alia, the so-called “Goliath inscription” from Tell es-Safi/Gath was mentioned….
4) Erez Ben-Yosef et al, who discussed some interesting results of Tom Levi’s project in the Edom lowlands, including details on some new sites at which there is evidence for early Iron Age and Iron IIA smelting activities.
5) Norma Franklin who discussed the so-called “Proto-Aeolic capitals” of the Iron Age, claiming, very logically, that none of them were actually capitals!”